


Administrative Mixup

by OxfordOctopus



Series: Administrative Duties [2]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow, Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Maxwell Lord Being an Asshole, Red Kryptonite, Side Story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:42:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26050588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: A place to put all the canon side-story content for Administrative Mishaps.
Series: Administrative Duties [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1891069
Comments: 4
Kudos: 65





	Administrative Mixup

Maxwell Lord was having a _trying_ day. It had started off, as seemed to have become a pattern for him, with his official release from being in government custody. That had been a good thing, one of the few good things he could comfortably say had happened today, though the fact that they’d stuffed a black bag over his head, manhandled him into a transport vehicle with enough force to bruise, and had then taken the bag off and more or less shoved him out onto the curb right next to his company headquarters had diminished it somewhat.

From there, everything had gone downhill. He’d ended up having to fight off two separate takeover attempts by people who had thought to capitalize on his absence, he’d found out that a good portion of the staff working on the KR Project had jumped ship, either to blow the whistle to the D.E.O. or to just go to ground entirely, it didn’t really matter. Combine that with the several new and _exciting_ threats Supergirl had somehow managed to attract to their humble little quarter of space, and, well, he was starting to go gray.

Glancing up at the stiff postures of his legal team, he could only see this getting worse. Turning around in his chair - and oh, you don’t know how much you can miss seats with backs until you’re stuck in a claustrophobic glass cage with a _metal bench_ as the totality of all furniture you have access to - he reached for the brandy and the expensive glasses he’d gotten as a Christmas present from a now very incarcerated Lex Luthor.

Hey, the man might be completely deranged, but he had decent taste in liquor.

“Alright,” he finally said, pulling the crystal stopper from the top of the bottle. “What’s the legal situation surrounding the project?”

A girl at the front - Emily, he thought; she had been a relatively recent hire - rushed forward, prying the manila folder from where she’d been clutching it to her chest before, gently, placing it in front of him.

Maxwell poured, let the glass fill up just a bit more than was altogether healthy, and took a drink.

“Legally speaking,” Emily began slowly, folding a painted index finger beneath the cover of the folder, flipping it open with a nudge. “We obtained and were granted access to all girls involved in the project totally above board. They can fine us on that, but they can’t press any real criminal charges—they might sue in terms of ethics, but not much more than that. They might have questions about how you managed to move the bodies around, which was the illegal part you were engaged with, but they have nothing concrete.”

Ah, the private medical industry. Money over morals might as well be the slogan of vast pharmaceutical companies and the hospitals they pretended not to own. “Well,” Maxwell said, taking another sip. “At least we have that much going for us.”

Emily winced. Maxwell felt a groan building in his throat, but tamped down on it and replaced the building noise with another sip of brandy.

Emily flipped to the next page, a picture of Patient 0—the black-haired girl, he remembered, the gene tampering hadn’t really shown any results outside of minor alterations, so they’d scrapped that idea and moved on for the rest—but not the ones he was used to. He’d kept a timeline for each patient, Patient 0 was no different, and he’d seen her steady decline into thin-limbed atrophy.

Clearly, he’d gotten _that_ wrong too. Patient 0 had been captured mid-walk, standing beside who else but _Kara Danvers_ , Supergirl, general pain in his neck and all-around hazard to his stress levels. She was clearly aware and awake, though the wide-eyed staring gave off a sense that she wasn’t particularly used to that fact. Not only that, but she also looked in significantly better shape than she had been just a month prior, with no signs of the hair loss or rapid muscle decay he’d observed in her.

Glancing up at Emily, Maxwell motioned mutedly for her to continue.

“Turns out, she does have a name: Adeline Taylor Queen,” Emily explained slowly. “Born in 1994 to a, ah, it says here Taylor Hebert and Adam Queen in a small clinic in Brookline. She blitzed through high school without much problem, showing prodigious talent in mathematics, went to the local university and got a degree in computer science at nearly record speeds, and then completely fell off the map, only to reappear when they found her with two bullet holes in her skull.”

Maxwell let go of his brandy and brought both hands up to his eyes, rubbing soothing circles into his lids. “She was braindead,” he said flatly. “How is she aware and coherent?”

“Because,” Emily said awkwardly, turning the page over. “We don’t believe she’s human.”

Of course she wouldn’t be.

Maxwell took another long drink from his glass. “Evidence?” He said, smacking his lips for emphasis. “We ran any number of tests, and if all of this is some extension of the brain node theory, let me tell you I _hire_ scientists for theory-crafting, not a _legal team_.”

Emily flinched at that, a sharp little jerk, and took a moment to gather herself. “From the D.E.O.,” she said, voice a bit weak. “We managed to obtain some documents.”

He’d have to send Patrick a raise. The man could do miracles, and it helped that he was apparently the one person who wasn’t compromised during his stint in alien Gitmo. A bit funny, considering he was a mole in the D.E.O., but hey he’d take the victories he could reach.

Pushing his glass to the side, Maxwell tugged the manila folder closer. In little detail, the pages below him roughly painted a picture of just _who_ , precisely, he’d fed Kryptonian DNA. Apparently, Adeline had started _out_ human, but was theorized to have some sort of distant ancestor who wasn’t. She’d always had that inactive node in her head, and that node had been connected to a species called a Shardite, a colony organism that seemed to be a rough approximation of his worst nightmare. Completely apathetic, driven to planetary destruction in their bid for new knowledge, and completely uninterested in the plights of humanity.

Except for one. Deviancy among Shardites, as the papers described, was quickly purged, but somehow, somewhen, a Shardite managed to escape the greater cluster after destroying the central network hub and laid dormant, psychically connected to Adeline, as she went through life. The link provided enough access to memories and knowledge for the Shardite to live her life concurrently with her, and during what they believed was an attempt to traffick her, she lost her right arm and was shot twice in the head.

After that, the parasite connected to Adeline apparently relived the memories over and over again, without anything else better to do, and eventually fundamentally fused with the consciousness that remained of Adeline, becoming a whole new entity that was neither completely human nor fundamentally inhuman. Then, of course, because his luck was abysmal, he’d not fired the scientist who brought her in out of a cannon the second he saw her and instead injected her with a slow-acting gene-editing treatment that had converted a good portion of her biology into one consistent with a Kryptonian’s.

He’d, in one fell swoop, been responsible for the creation of new life and had just possibly armed an alien intelligence considered “so telepathically vast to be of deep concern in the event of a change of character” with partial Kryptonian powers. Abso-fucking-lutely perfect. Brilliant, completely and utterly amazing. He already had _one_ semi-problematic fucking Kryptonian, and at least that one had been _dim_.

This one? Superintelligence. All of his worst nightmares, at the same time.

“ _Please_ tell me one of you was intelligent enough to keep tabs on any social media activity, anything at all to get a rough understanding of her personality?”

Emily nodded, flipped a few pages over. “It wasn’t hard to track her social media accounts down. We used Kara Danvers’ to make the initial discovery, as they are living together and Kara rather suddenly followed a new Twitter account by the name of ‘QTAddy’. From there, it was just finding other accounts with that name made at around roughly the same time.”

“And?”

That got him a weird look. Not at him, no, but it was somewhere between awkwardness and shame. “Well, she likes geese.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Within the first two days of creating her twitter account, Adeline followed approximately two-hundred and thirty-five accounts primarily devoted to the appreciation of geese, their photography, and videos of them. There are more media-based accounts for geese that she follows than ones primarily focused on _goose facts_ , however of them roughly one third are devoted to goose facts or information about them.”

Maxwell could feel a headache coming on. He reached for the brandy again.

“Of the rest, fifty were of pretty common follows, seemingly copied wholesale from who Kara Danvers follows, thirty were accounts focused on patterns and colours, and a dozen others were for more miscellanea waterfowl.”

He filled the glass to the brim, motioning for her to continue as he brought it to his lips.

“She also made thirty comments, of which were two long, several-post chains where she corrected someone on geese in great detail, and the remainder was a protracted four-way argument about geese being the most superior bird, to quote, ‘on this miserable, technologically backwards husk of a planet’. This is unusual for her, mind you, she otherwise appears to be timid and avoids too much interaction, and is relatively even in tone when engaging in conversation, but apparently she got very heated.”

Maxwell drained the entire glass. So the superintelligence was arguing on the internet about _geese_.

He wasn’t really sure what to think of that.

* * *

Finding the rest of Adeline’s accounts wasn’t an issue. Most did keep to the username format of ‘QTAddy’, with minor alterations. It was through these, for the most part, that Maxwell figured a few things out.

For starters, Adeline’s fixation on geese - and to a lesser extent, waterfowl in general - wasn’t something she was using to put people off. Or, at least, if she was, she was _really_ committing to the act, considering just about every place she could find to include geese, she would. Her Instagram account, for example, was absolutely dense with dozens of surprisingly well-shot photos of geese in the backyard, as well as a handful of shots of geese in other places.

Second, Adeline now worked for CatCo, with _Kara Danvers_ , as a junior IT tech. That was about the worst place he could conceive to put the hyper-advanced alien intelligence with a loose understanding of morals, but hey, clearly Supergirl knew what she was doing with _this_ Kryptonian, just like she did with the ones who came out of Fort Rozz. Surely she wouldn’t immediately trust someone she’s only known for a few days and give them access to one of the largest online information providers on the planet, right?

Right?

Of course she did. Because she was Kara Danvers and if she wouldn’t kill him _literally_ she would clearly do it with fucking kindness. Not kindness directed at _him_ , mind, but the kindness she directed at the _rest_ of the planet.

Third, Adeline was... _unique_. Maybe he was reading a bit too into things, seeing as he hadn’t taken an ethics course in his life, let alone a psychology course, but she wasn’t exactly _normal_ , even by the standard conventions of the term. She wasn’t particularly alien either, just very, very weird. Her fixations were grand and unending, she was hyper-intelligent and yet failed to read the room when it came to correcting someone on the proper parts of a goose, and she apparently had enough multi-tasking ability to be pretty consistently active across several online accounts despite working a thankless 9-to-5 job.

Honestly, he wondered if this was what good ol’ Doctor Frankenstein felt like. Really, while he understood the issues people might’ve had with his decision to experiment on comatose, unknown adult women, and then carefully emotionally and mentally manipulate the one - or, well, one of two now, he supposed - success into an anti-Supergirl weapon, he also wasn’t really sure what the big problem was. They _were_ all braindead, after all, it wasn’t like the rest of them were suddenly going to abruptly emerge from their comatose states.

Really, he considered them more akin to _parts_ than anything else.

But all things considered, unintended consequences of his actions - especially the ones which made people look at him oddly - wasn’t exactly _new_ per-se, but Adeline was the odd duck out of them, that much was for certain. It’s not every day you make life, after all, or at least not fully _formed_ life, and as far as he can tell by pouring over his notes and digging a bit into the D.E.O. mainframe - they really should use some of that alien tech to shore up their network defences, honestly, it’s like they can’t even exploit what they have - he was, more or less, the reason _why_ Adeline was around. Whether or not anyone liked it, he had been the one to make her, however accidentally and, in hindsight, somewhat ignorantly.

He really should’ve just not gone along with the plan. ‘Inexplicable odd parts of the brain that nobody can fully explain’ is generally the plot point to a Lovecraft novel. He should’ve known better, but, well, scientific progress doesn’t really wait for _anyone_ , let alone something as culturally anchored as _ethics_.

So, sure. He might’ve created life, he might’ve been responsible for giving a vast alien intelligence a Kryptonian meat suit, and, sure, he might be _somewhat_ stalking his creation online, but he was pretty sure this was the least unethical thing he had done in years. If nobody else would keep an eye on the potentially genocidal Shardite, he’d do it himself, just like he had for Supergirl.

He did wonder about the goose fixation though. Was it empathy? Adeline spoke of geese like they were some ultimate lifeform, highly adaptable and ‘perfectly aggressive’ - and _what a term that was_ \- alongside a multitude of other explanations, but it didn’t really seem like she related to them in any way. She just thought they were very neat, and superior to all other forms of birds, flightless or otherwise.

If push came to shove, maybe he could win her trust with some sort of exotic goose as a pet?

* * *

Maxwell stared down at the chunk of crystal, glowing and green in all of its glory. It was some of the kryptonite he’d filched off of an unsuspecting D.E.O. in the interim. It was pure as it could be, and it would be the eventual path to the creation of his own kryptonite. He, at least, knew it was possible to synthesize it, if incredibly difficult. After all, it wasn’t like chunks of Krypton were just occasionally dropping out of orbit and into the planet, and Lex had to have gotten his surplus from _somewhere_.

Looking at it scientifically, Kryptonite was the rough approximation of a copper IUD. It, well, did _things_ , to Kryptonians, and presumably Adeline - which had been the reason why he was pushing forward on the plan to synthesize it early - but nobody was really sure how or why. It emitted radiation, not toxic to people in any quantity, and could act as a pretty impressive fuel source when the time came. It did all of this without being violently lethal to most things with a heartbeat like most other radioactive substances, but it sure did them.

It was a mystery metal. Really, it was a lot like the other chunk of mystery metal he had sitting in his lab. That was the stuff he’d gotten off of some of the Fort Rozz debris, a type of metal that made, to be entirely blunt, zero fucking sense. From D.E.O. records they called it ‘nth metal’ and it might quite literally be magic. He hadn’t even fucking known magic existed until a shitty rapidly-copied report had told him as such.

So, really, he was pretty sure kryptonite was at least a little magic. So little of Kryptonian biology actually made any lick of sense otherwise.

Now, if only he could synthesize it. That would make things immeasurably easier, a constant supply of kryptonite would shore up all the difficulties he’d been having. Supergirl became significantly less of a threat with it around, and going by even a portion of the report on Adeline, she was even more ill when exposed to it. It was basically the skeleton key to his lock, the literal unobtanium that was preventing him from concluding the plans he’d need to ensure Earth’s continued wellbeing.

Especially considering Non was still around. God, how many Kryptonians were there?

And, really, he had the basic atomic structure down, and a rough understanding of what he’d need to do to synthesize it. He was right on the cusp, and how hard could it be?

* * *

[SOMETIME LATER]

Did you know Kryptonite was explosive?

Staring up at the burning lab, Maxwell took another long, long drink from his very expensive, now very cracked crystal glass.

Yeah, neither did he.

He probably should’ve figured as much when the damn stuff turned _red_.


End file.
